Angela de la Cruz

Angela de la Cruz. Self Flat AshameA new exhibition in London of Angela de la Cruz is written about in the Guardian today.  de la Cruz does broken canvases on stretchers, starting off with a regular painting and then breaking it, literally, apart.  Then she breaks other things apart, notably chairs, which collide with the canvases, canvases collide with the walls and so on.  It appears to be powerful work; she's been working this way for 15 years.  One of the pieces, Flat Stuck is shown here in the background of the image of Self Flat Ashame above.  Flat Stuck is the collapsed orange stacking chair.

I don't think this chair is one of the old Eames fibreglas shells, or one of its plastic knock-offs, but it is similar: a bare bones chair, the most vulnerable point being where the legs attach to the shell. 

de la Cruz is saying a number of things in her work about vulnerability and about the act of selection that transforms a throw away bit of ruin into an intentional art piece.  Duchamp lives, but his ideas are so naturalised that they rarely are acknowledged any more.  de la Cruz herself talks about the problem with painting: slashing a canvas animates it: painting's grandiosity is removed and although it is still a painting, its object nature is made extreme.

I must agree.  After thinking about this work and then going back and looking at a conventionally hung flat canvas on the gallery wall, it does seem to be arch, coy, carrying ambitions on its surface it cannot possibly fulfil.